Simulation of snow albedo and solar irradiance profile with the two-stream radiative transfer in snow (TARTES) v2.0 model

Abstract

Abstract. The Two-streAm Radiative TransfEr in Snow (TARTES) model computes the spectral albedo and the profiles of spectral absorption, irradiance and actinic fluxes for a multi-layer plane-parallel snowpack. Each snow layer is characterized by its specific surface area, density, and impurities content, in addition to shape parameters. In the landscape of snow optical numerical models, TARTES distinguishes itself by taking into account different shapes of the particles through two shape parameters, namely the absorption enhancement parameter B and the asymmetry factor g. This is of primary importance as recent studies working at the microstructure level have demonstrated that snow does not behave as a collection of equivalent ice spheres, a representation widely used in other models. Instead, B and g take specific values that do not correspond to any simple geometrical shape, which leads to the concept of "optical shape of snow". Apart from this specificity, TARTES combines well established radiative transfer principles to compute the scattering and absorption coefficients of pure or polluted snow, and the δ-Eddington two-stream approximation to solve the multi-layer radiative transfer equation. The model is implemented in Python, but conducting TARTES simulations is also possible without any programming through the SnowTARTES web application, making it very accessible to non-experts and for teaching purposes. Here, after describing the theoretical and technical details of the model, we illustrate its main capabilities and present some comparisons with other common snow radiative transfer models (AART, DISORT-Mie, SNICAR-ADv3) as a validation procedure. Overall the agreement on the spectral albedo, when in compatible conditions (i.e. with spheres), is usually within 0.02, and is better in the visible and near-infrared compared to longer wavelengths of the solar domain.